(8) Tue Mar 20 2012 08:59Constellation Games Author Commentary #17: "Their First Contact Was Better":
This chapter has the best title in the whole book. Just gettin' that out of the way. This week sets up the plot for the next couple months while focusing the action on the emotional core of Part Two: Ariel's relationships with other humans people from Earth.

I really liked the comments from last week's commentary--two people I didn't know were reading said hello, Brendan responded to my evaluation of his reader commentary, and my friend Zack (whose name I stupidly misspelled) disputed my use of Creative License. If you're enjoying these commentaries, please do say hi in the comments.

The original name for Part One was "Company", and Part Two was
"Crunch Time". "Hardware" and "Software" aren't as snappy
individually, but this way the names form a coherent mini-story. (The final
part is called "Artwork".)

In part one (I don't like the way that looks when capitalized, so
let's try it not) we focused on two Constellation species, the Farang and the
Aliens. Part two introduces the Gaijin, not through a single
Curic-level character but through bit characters and the human use of
their technology. I'll defer their commentary, since all you've seen at this
point is Tammy mentioning that she talked to He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!.

This chapter has the scene on the ISS I
mentioned back in December 2009, where I fudged the system the
astronauts use to call home. This has been... Creative License.

Phillip (not Moe!) is another one of those fun one-shot characters
like the hippie in chapter 2. Like many one-shots, I suspect Phillip
is more interesting the less you know about him, so let's move on.

Check out the "Mallory" reference! ("Mutant's Revenge
cocktail arcade cabinet") In the same scene where Jenny mentions 3D printing! Does this mean Constellation Games
takes place in the same universe as "Mallory"? No, sorry, they just
share a fictional video game. By a supreme act of will I've not
written a big block of nerd analysis about why they can't be the same
universe. (The real reason is that if space aliens showed up in the "Mallory" universe, it would retroactively become ineligible for publication in Futurismic.)

But, speaking of "Mallory", my friend Alexei recently told me about ANGELINA, an AI system that designs video games and then simulates a person playing the games to find the ones that are fun. This means basically everything from "Mallory" now exists in real life, a mostly horrifying prospect.

Smart paper, the arrival of which Ariel is dreading, is another
import from "Vanilla". But in "Vanilla" it was just a generic piece of
near-future tech. Now it's Constellation tech that's effectively being
given to humanity as a bribe. ("But not like flashy desperate
jewelry.") We've seen with the False Daylight that a computer embodies the values of the culture that created it. Smart paper was kind of bland in "Vanilla", effectively a flexible iPad. Now it's a Gaijin computer repurposed by the Constellation for use by humans, which is a lot more fun.

I hope you don't feel it's a terrible spoiler that I'm talking
about smart paper like it's going to figure in the book at some point,
totally eliminating the possibility that Ariel and Jenny have a huge
conversation about it in this chapter but it never shows up.

In "Vanilla" the smart paper was called vellum, but that was just
so you'd know to differentiate it from static paper. "Vellum" was
probably a brand name. Now it's just "smart paper", and near the end
of the book, Ariel just calls it a "paper computer", because "smart
paper" is the kind of dumb name you use for a technology when it's
new.

I think the diner banter between Ariel and Jenny came out really
well. I wanna say the same of the Ariel/Tammy flirting, but an author
praising their own sexy writing is just asking for trouble.

As the story turns to Ariel's intraspecies relationships, he becomes a less reliable narrator. Here, he puts up a public blog post with part of a conversation, then "real life"s the remainder of the conversation, which is full of stuff he needs to keep secret.

"So what's he editing out of the 'real life' sections?" you may
ask. Well may you ask. Because of the tight POV I can't show you that
within the novel, but you'll see some of it in "Found Objects", the
Jenny story.

Maybe you were wondering how Dana Light could possibly be a major
character in the novel. Wonder no more!

BTW, if you figured this out earlier, or if you guessed
incorrectly, or even didn't think about it at all, I'd like to hear
about it. It's always tricky putting together a plot twist without
springing it prematurely, and I'm interested in hearing how
readers react, because I really like when I'm reading a book and the author successfully pulls off something like this.

Of course, since you've been reading the commentary you knew that something was going to happen involving Dana. My hope is that up to this point, most readers have thought of Dana as just a commentary on Bai's personality, when she's actually more important than Bai.

And there we go. Be sure to tune in next week, when Ariel's all like, that's right, motherfucker, you're not the only one who can use paper. Oh, and Tetsuo writes a game review!

The thing I have a problem with re Ariel/Tammy is, they seem to have hooked up awfully fast. What we've seen of their interaction seems more typical (to me) of a couple who've been together for quite some time, not one who just met.

I also found the A/T scene in this segment a bit confusing: if Tammy's on the old ISS instead of Ring City, why is the 'net blacked out for her, and why is she talking about what she did to Ariel's space in Human Ring?

I wish I could say I saw the Dana twist coming, having thought a bunch about AI in this universe, but I didn't. It seems blindingly obvious in hindsight.

They did hook up very fast. Part of this is Tammy's personality and part of it is that Ariel's the narrator. (SPOILER) Tammy thinks she's got an occasional fling with a cute younger guy, but Ariel's taking it very seriously due to his MPDG fantasy. Note that Tammy's kind of casual in the phone call and Ariel's acting like he thought he'd never hear her voice again.

I won't make excuses for why the ISS segment is confusing, but here's what happened in plain English. Some of the astronauts dragged a port from Ring City to the (now-crewless) ISS, specifically so they could evade the Internet blackout by using its phone. But so many people want to use the phone that Tammy doesn't have time to surf the web. She still lives on Ring City and she'll go back through the port after making her phone calls.

Yeah, if I had it to do over again I'd change "our apartment." I was imagining she meant "the apartment we had sex in, as distinct from the 4,999,999 other Human Ring apartments," and Ariel didn't catch that. But the POV's so tight on Ariel that it's tough to see anything he doesn't catch.

I'm a big old AI chauvinist, so I was pretty sure that Bai was only around to introduce Dana. Without looking back, I think I remember Curic making some remark about human-AI relations when introduced to Dana in Austin, and I've been hoping that she might get a conversation with a low-level Smoke submind at some point.

Speaking of spurious characters, anyone else think there's something a little *off* about @OMJennyG? She has a twitter account but doesn't tweet -- yet @ArielBlum supposedly RTs her. Her info line, "you don't know me nearly as well as you think you do," is perhaps supposed to be a reference to how we only see her via Ariel's narration, but taken all together it starts to seem like someone is pulling a _Fight Club_.

Far be it from me to discourage speculation, but I just didn't have time to write a stream for @OMJennyG. Her account was originally protected to give the impression that she was posting, but lots of people were putting in follow requests, so I just made it public so you'd see there was nothing there.

However, I will say that there is a special bit in chapter 29 for those who think along these lines...

Thanks for the clarification on Ariel/Tammy -- it makes a lot more sense with that background. I suspect it will also work better when I can read the whole book in one go. I'm having trouble taking proper account of Ariel's unreliability because of the serial format, I think.